Hans Zimmer

Nothing means anything until you have a tune.
And a tune, that's the job.
You sit there in front of the piano.
And there are 88 notes on that keyboard, of which only 11 means something before they repeat in the octave.
And you know everybody else has played those notes before.
And somehow you have to figure out how to write something original with it, but at the same time, not too original, because it has to be appropriate to the story.
I'm not doing concert music.
I am trying to be telling the parallel story that the filmmakers are taking.
So there are restrictions, yet you're supposed to be completely free.
So there are contradictions in everything I do.
A great example of all of that is actually Beethoven's Fifth, not that I'm comparing myself to Beethoven.
But dun, dun, dun, dun, every kid has walked up to the piano and gone, dun, dun, dun, dun.
But he knew, somehow, that out of those notes, you could go and build castles in the sky.
You could invent something.
You could tell a story with those notes.
They're so simple.
That's what you need to figure out, how to find the simplest thing to set the thing in motion.
But you have to, at the same time-- and this is why I sit there, day in, day out, driving myself crazy, you have to know.
You have to make a decision that whatever those opening notes are, whatever the first thing is that you have to say, is actually going to hold water, is actually going to somehow take you through this vast arc of a story.
And not halfway through the movie, you suddenly go, you know something?
I can't make these notes become mournful, happy, exciting, all the different personalities they need to take on.
And sometimes you just have to kill your favorite babies.
Even though you're trying to write from inspiration, you're trying to be relatively practical.
One of the things I don't do is I don't use a lot of exuberant key changes in my music.
Or even if I do, I try to always come back to my home key.
Part of that is practical.
I like writing in d.
And everybody thinks it's because I'm lazy, which is true.
But it's not the reason I'm write in d.
I write in d because, in this modern day and age, the bass can go down to C, which is their open string.
But they can't do vibrato on the open string.
So D is actually a good note, where they can so do a little bit of vibrato.
And it's nice that if you go from-- [PLAYING PIANO] It's satisfying!
So if I have to give you an answer, if I have to complete a phrase, and I have to give you an answer, I like when it ends on a note that bass and celli and violas-- violins is a different matter-- can land on in a satisfying way.
At least I set myself up to have that possibility.
The whole score might never do this.
And it might just be up here.
[PLAYING PIANO] But I don't know that at the beginning.
So if I pick something that gives me ...

Tell a story with music

Hans Zimmer didn’t see a film until he was 12 years old. Since then, he’s scored over 150 films, including Inception, The Lion King, and The Dark Knight. In his MasterClass, the self-taught Academy Award winner teaches how he creates sounds from nothing, composes compelling character themes, and scores a movie before ever seeing it. By the end, you’ll have everything you need to tell your story.

Watch, listen, and learn as Hans teaches his first-ever film scoring class.

A downloadable workbook accompanies the class with lesson recaps and supplemental materials.

Upload videos to get feedback from the class. Hans will also critique select student work.